Profile

Stefano's work at the Oxford Internet Institute focuses on the analysis and visualisation of
the geographies of the Internet. The project aims to study the contemporary geographies of
knowledge and the ways that those information landscapes are changing over time. In particular,
he is interested in studying how geography influences information access, production, and
representation, and how geographic places are discussed and represented on the Internet.

Stefano's PhD project at GIVA unit of the University of Zurich aimed to develop a generic
approach to the abstract problem of the assessment of Geographic Relevance. This is a rather
recent concept that can be defined as a quality of an entity in geographic space or its
representation in an information system, i.e. an object, document, or image. This quality is
expressed as the relation between an entity (or its representation) and the actual context of
using the representation. More pragmatically, Geographic Relevance aims to assess the relevance
of an object that is a representation of a geographic entity within a computer system or
information database. This object can be a collection of documents or an entry in a database
describing a point of interest. Still, even if the object is a single document, the objective is
to approximate the relevance of the entity, not to judge the relevance of a geo-referenced
document or a document reporting geographic information. Considering this facet, Geographic
Relevance is rather far from the current understanding that underlies Geographic IR, Mobile IR
and IR systems in general.

The map of global use of websites created by Mark Graham and Stefano De Sabbata is reported in the Daily Mail. The data visualisation shows each country sized according to its internet-enable population.

Following reports there are now more than a billion websites, researchers Mark Graham and Stefano de Sabbata have created an interactive map that reveals just how far and wide these sites penetrate the globe.

Wired.co.uk reports on Mark Graham’s work on mapping patterns of work as part of a project on virtual labour. He will be visiting eight countries in Asia and Africa over two years to carry out the essential field work.

Analysis by Mark Graham and colleagues of over 3 million Wikipedia articles in the 44 most popular languages reveals that the majority of references are about an area occupying only 2.5 percent of the world's land mass.

An Empire called Google: Brazilian magazine Epoca features a map by the OII's Mark Graham and Stefano De Sabbata depicting the world's "Internet empires" highlighting the most popular website in each country.

Google is the most popular website used in New Zealand and around the world, with over one billion people visiting it, according to new research conducted by the OII's Mark Graham and Stefano De Sabbata.

Stefano De Sabbata and Dr Mark Graham from the Oxford Internet Institute have created a map which shows the most popular website in each country, using a design that pays homage to the Age of Empires video game series.

Blog

Description The map shows percentage of Internet users in local authority districts (LADs) in England, Wales and Scotland based on a statistical tool called Small Area Estimation. Darker shading indicates […]

Description This series of maps shows the location of edited content in the world’s largest collaborative mapping project: OpenStreetMap. Data The maps use OpenStreetMap data downloaded from GeoFabrik.de on December […]

Description This map shows the global distribution of geo-located entities described in Freebase, a collaborative knowledge base that defines itself as “an open shared database of the world’s knowledge”. Data […]

Description This map points out the highly uneven spatial distribution of (geotagged) Wikipedia articles in 44 language versions of the encyclopaedia. Slightly more than half of the global total of […]

This graphic maps a combination of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) in order to provide an indication of the total number of domain registrations in every country worldwide.